Before you invest millions or even billions of dollars in a foreign or domestic business or individual, you need accurate, thorough and reliable information that provides you with the insight you need concerning your potential risks. Lenders, venture capital firms and prospective partners require a confidence that the persons and/or organizations requesting financing have a clear background.

Stodacom’s Africa network of investigators and representatives is able to gather the detailed, in-depth information about business history, resources, credentials and reputation on both local and international levels. We will uncover everything you need to know to make an informed decision moving forward and to protect yourself from sizeable losses and serious liabilities. We provide banks, financial institutions, venture capital firms and potential venture partners the ability to make their decision based on a solid foundation.

Any organization that sells through channel partners should have a due diligence programme in place, where it conducts proactive integrity analysis on its channel partners prior to engaging them and throughout the life of their engagement with the company.

At Stodacom we truly see an intrinsic value and business advantage in conducting due diligence on third parties, as well as working towards the development of a comprehensive third party compliance programme

which seeks to reduce the risk of selling through the channel and builds business value through stronger sales partners.

The Stodacom’s due diligence and integrity analysis services rangefrom simple checks of a proposed intermediarys background to a full due diligence of an organizations compliance programme. Our solutions are designed to support global legal & compliance programmes by providing an effective and detailed integrity analysis on business partners, resellers, suppliers, agents, manufacturers and other third parties.

Every report, large or small, is reviewed by a member of our team of attorneys, compliance experts, forensic accountants, fraud investigators, and corruption investigators for accuracy and identification of red flags. With this analysis in place, you will be able to proactively assess and mitigate the risks involved and make an informed decision. Our approach is to provide a cost effective and simple solution that exceeds your compliance needs and gives you the ability to quickly and effectively defend your due diligence process before a regulator.

Our Enhanced Due Diligence Solutions (Level I and Level II research) uncover risk-related information that allows our clients to make confident, well-informed business decisions.

The Enhanced Due Diligence solutions are cost-effective and offer rapid turnaround to meet the needs of evaluating potential investments and business partners, and to meet regulatory compliance requirements (AML, KYC, FCPA), particularly in higher risk jurisdictions.   Our solutions leverage a potent blend of data, technology and human intelligence, enabling us to develop deep insights as quickly as possible. As with all our services, Enhanced Due Diligence can be managed by our clients via Kroll’s Due Diligence Portal, which allows programmatic management of due diligence activities.

In both English and the local language, Stodacom’s analysts review a wide range of media sources, as well as federal, state and local regulatory and court databases to confirm professional registrations and ownership, and to assess regulatory exposure and involvement in legal proceedings.  In jurisdictions where less information is available online, where more insight is needed about a subject’s corporate affiliations, or where perspectives on a subject’s character, political connections and business practices are desired, our Enhanced Due Diligence research augments the public record with in-country and on-site research.

Stodacom’s Enhanced Due Diligence team is highly skilled in research, observation and inquiry, and includes former prosecutors, journalists, law-enforcement agents and experienced industry professionals.  They unearth hidden information and identify patterns to create detailed portraits of subjects’ business activities and overall reputation.

Recovering files from damaged operating systems or hardware.

Preserving the original disk drive or other digital media in its pristine condition.

Making forensic images or copies of originals, either at our offices or on site

Recovering data from systems on which there’s been an attempt to: Sabotage, hide, delete, overwrite or steal information, including:

• The existence of any undisclosed beneficial shareholdings in the entity;
• The nature and extent of political exposure of the entity or its principals;
• Whether any public officials exercise an ownership or managerial role in the entity;
• Potential conflicts of interest within the entity that might affect the client;
• The likelihood of involvement by the entity or its principals in any form of corruption;
• The involvement of the entity or its principals in activities likely to contravene the client’s ethical policies;
• The entity’s general reputation amongst its customers, suppliers and host community;
• The existence of legal or regulatory investigations into the entity’s activities or those of its principals;
• The viability and credibility of existing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes and other forms of community engagement.

Stodacom recommends that, wherever possible, integrity investigations should be conducted with the full knowledge and co-operation of the target. In such cases, Stodacom staff will visit the target in person to conduct face to face interviews, as appropriate, drawing on findings from discreet investigations carried out by our  Advisers. However, if required for commercial reasons, Stodacom can also conduct fully undeclared, discreet investigations.

At the conclusion of its investigations, Stodacom provides clients with comprehensive written reports that may be held as evidence of rigorous risk assessment of potential exposure to corrupt and other unethical practices. The reports are designed to assess targets with specific reference to:

• the provisions of relevant laws, such as the UK Bribery Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the US;
• legal, regulatory and peer-practice constraints on the target, such as the King Code on Corporate Governance in South Africa;
• clients ethical policy guidelines and other relevant internal policy documents;
• relevant international codes, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) or the Equator principles;
• the impact of the Environmental Social and Governance agenda on the client’s valuations; and
• internationally accepted ethical best practice, such as the guidelines of the European Sustainable Investment Forum (Eurosif)

During the course of an insurance investigation our team collects written testimonies, interrogates witnesses, and takes photographs and audio records. Over the years we exposed many involved in insurance fraud though our investigations. The steady rise in the number of drivers and cars is directly increasing the filing of insurance claims. There are attempts being made by people to file false claims and inflate the damage value.

Many claims are filed based on incorrect evidence and with malicious intention of cheating insurance companies and receiving insurance compensation. Claims are made following some type of incidents like a business set on fire, car accident, theft or robbery etc.

Dealing with these fraudulent practices requires professional help from investigation agencies with the experience in investigating insurance claims. We take responsibility for analyzing and verifying claims and exposing its true causes.

The situation in Africa quietly began to change during the period 1995-2005. Profound macroeconomic reforms tamed inflation and opened economies to international trade. More patchily, the regulatory environment facing international business also improved. Public ratings, such as the World Banks Doing Business surveys, enabled African governments to benchmark their performance and began to put pressure on those that were recalcitrant. As the global commodity boom built to its 2008 crescendo, many African countries were well positioned to harness the spike in their export revenues for growth beyond the resource extraction sector itself.

That upturn in national growth rates was mirrored in the increased profitability of companies operating in Africa. Indeed, three distinct sources of data indicate that returns on investment are higher there than in other regions. One was a comprehensive study of the publicly traded companies operating in Africa for the period 2002-07, mostly in the manufacturing and services sectors. It found that these companies average return on capital was around two-thirds higher than that of comparable companies in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Another source, on the foreign direct investment of U.S. companies, showed that they were getting a higher return on their African investments than on those in other regions.

Finally, analysis of a series of surveys of several thousand manufacturing firms around the developing world found that, at the margin, capital investment had a higher return in Africa. This was the scene in the years leading up to the global crisis. Although its origins had nothing to do with the continent, the crisis did not bypass Africa. Its effect was to collapse commodity prices–for example, the price of oil initially tumbled by more than $100 a barrel. More subtly, the international appetite for risk collapsed, and since Africa is still generally viewed as the riskiest region, investors got scared; for example, international banks curtailed letters of credit to African exporters far more drastically than to those in other regions. These effects were severe. However, with a few exceptions “inevitable in a region with so many countries “Africa weathered the economic storms well. Led by its two largest economies, South Africa and Nigeria, most countries had built prudent fiscal positions: In a remarkable break with its past, Nigeria had freed itself from debt and built up over $70 billion of foreign exchange reserves. Further, the adverse impact of the crisis through commodity prices lasted less than a year for Africa. Globally, commodity prices rapidly bounced back and seem to have stabilized around levels markedly higher than those in the decades before the boom, underwritten by growing Asian economies and their corresponding need for commodities.

Merger & Acquisition strategies for growth can be significantly improved in their effectiveness with the Market Engineering system. Typically these strategies are implemented by lawyers and financial advisors with little regard to the marketing implications. In this section, we will discuss ways to integrate Market Engineering into this strategy successfully.

10 Solid Reasons to Support an Acquisition Strategy

1. Target holding unique market position
2. A potential turnaround situation
3. Complimentary skill sets
4. Geographic expansion move
5. Ability to cut duplicate costs and improve profit
6. Elimination of competition
7. Increase in breadth and depth of product line
8. Improvement of IPO possibility
9. Access to new customer base
10. Stopping opportunities for key competitor

10 Ways Market Engineering Can Make Mergers & Acquisitions More Successful

1. Improving negotiation and price by knowing the company’s exact market position
2. Providing credibility and insurance to investors and bankers
3. Selecting the optimal acquisition candidate for your company
4. Identifying market opportunities that an acquisition strategy can exploit
5. Measuring customer attitudes on company’s products to indicate their image in market
6. Providing customer demographic data that gives insight into future market potential and growth for targeted company
7. Identifying opportunities for growth in market segmentation analysis
8. Providing competitive benchmarking measurements to identify areas for fast improvement in company
9. Measuring market and technical trends to forecast future growth potential of company’s technology
10. Identifying key trends in the market, the company’s customers, and relative position with competitors to pinpoint future problems and opportunities

Checklist for Successful Mergers & Acquisitions

• Buy, read, and implement Industrial Market Research & Forecasting or Healthcare Market Research & Forecasting
• Clarify objectives of acquisition program
• Define ideal company description
• Create database of potential companies
• Create market and financially based screening procedure
• Interview target’s customer base to verify position
• Analyze other competitors in market
• Integrate market position into negotiation process

The following questions will help our consultants target their strategic consulting advice to your specific situation. Once we receive this information, our consultants and market analysts will analyze your situation based on the Frost & Sullivan world database of market information, applying years of practical industry experience and current market conditions. There is no obligation and no cost for this service. Please take time to answer the questions in as great detail as possible. Your responses will be kept strictly confidential and will only be used to create carefully targeted strategic advice.

The size of the market can be evaluated based on present sales and on potential sales if the use of the product were expanded. The following are some information sources for determining market size

A simple means of forecasting the market growth rate is to extrapolate historical data into the future. While this method may provide a first-order estimate, it does not predict important turning points. A better method is to study growth drivers such as demographic information and sales growth in complementary products. Such drivers serve as leading indicators that are more accurate than simply extrapolating historical data.

Important inflection points in the market growth rate sometimes can be predicted by constructing a product diffusion curve. The shape of the curve can be estimated by studying the characteristics of the adoption rate of a similar product in the past.

Ultimately, the maturity and decline stages of the product life cycle will be reached. Some leading indicators of the decline phase include price pressure caused by competition, a decrease in brand loyalty, the emergence of substitute products, market saturation, and the lack of growth drivers.